Note: This sermon was preached Aug. 16 at the “From Seminary to Society: Journeys of Legacy, Loss and Hope” reunion of graduates and former faculty members of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, hosted by Wake Forest University School of Divinity. The sermon text is Luke 12: 49-56.
I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.
You talk about a “hard saying!”
This is no “gentle Jesus meek and mild, smile upon a little child.” It’s Jesus who’s become a Baptist! OK, not a Baptist, but the Baptist. John the Baptist is dead at the hands of Herod the autocrat (some things never change). Prophetically speaking, John took no prisoners. Remember his words to the religious crowd?
In the KJV, John says one is coming “whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” (There’s the fire metaphor again.) I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want is to be “throughly purged.”
Bill Leonard
Then Jesus gets more specific: “From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three; a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father, a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother, a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Again, some things never change!)
Jesus then told the crowds, “When you see (a) cloud rising in the west you say immediately that it is going to rain — and so it does; and when you notice that the wind is blowing from the south you say that it is going to be hot — and so it is. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky; why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
Two thousand years later, some things still never change! In 2025, we’ve got weather satellites telling us when it’s going to rain and global warming making this the hottest year on record, but we still don’t “know how to interpret the present time.”
This text is so powerful, dynamic, sobering and frightful that we probably should have read it a couple of times to each other, sat in silence for a while to contemplate its meaning, given each other a group hug, and gone on our way.
But damn it, I’m not the Baptist, but I am a Baptist, compelled to think aloud with you on the way to bread and cup. Let’s acknowledge the truth of the Gospel text, and let it chill us to the bone, because our entire country is living it right now. The advantage we SBTS-related folks have is that we’ve been confronting “this present time” for more than 40 years, one way or another. What we didn’t know back then is that what was happening at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary would ultimately fall on the whole country.
If we’ve learned anything, it is that this present time isn’t just an assault on American democracy, the rule of law, the Constitution, diversity, equality, inclusion, empathy, poor people, sick people, special needs people; it’s an assault on the truth, grace and calling of Christ’s gospel, even while much of that assault is being committed in Jesus’ name.
Confronting the present time, I have to acknowledge SBTS taught me about the necessity of dissent.
“Confronting the present time, I have to acknowledge SBTS taught me about the necessity of dissent.”
In Dissent in American Religion, Baptist historian Edwin Scott Gaustad laid out that imperative, writing, “Should a society (whether church or state) actually succeed … in suffocating all contrary opinion, then its own vital juices no longer flow, and the shadow of death begins to fall across it. No society — ecclesiastical or political, military or literary — can afford to be snared by its own slogans.”
Gaustad acknowledged dissent can be “irritating, unnerving, pigheaded, noisy and brash. It can also be wrong.” Yet, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, he concluded that “consent makes democracy possible, dissent makes democracy meaningful.”
Dissenters compound faith’s eccentricities and call attention to the ways in which governments and religious communities cut deals with their consciences for the sake of order and control. Gaustad notes: “This reform of religion in the name of religion, this growing edge, this refusal to let well enough alone, is the role of dissent.” It “may also be a manifestation of the unfettered human spirit.”
At Southern we learned Baptists at their best have been doing that from the start.
In the early 1980s, ethics professor Henlee Barnette discovered former Catholic priest Philip Berrigan was leading a protest in Louisville and invited him to speak at SBTS. Berrigan left the priesthood in 1969 and married Elzabeth McAlister. They had three children, also founding the Plowshares protest movement in 1980. Berrigan talked about that in his lecture, afterward joining a group of us in the faculty lounge.
Suddenly I realized I was the only one left with him and we kept talking. He told me he was on a pass from prison where he was serving time for trespassing on government property during protests against nuclear weapons. Elizabeth was in a different prison for the same offense. I told him I’d just been talking about Quaker founder George Fox and his wife, Margaret Fell Fox, both similarly imprisoned by the British government in the 1600s.
“Suddenly I realized I was the only one left with him and we kept talking.”
Baptists complained so voraciously about the seminary having Berrigan speak that the administration posted a note on the president’s bulletin board repudiating his presence on campus. Seminary students taped a notice outside the bulletin board declaring they repudiated the president’s repudiation.
Dissent, from George Fox to Philip Berrigan to Henlee Barnette to SBTS students.
A Black Baptist student, now a renowned pastor, Ronald Bobo, challenged me to join him at a January protest at Louisville Gas and Electric when the company was cutting off power to folks who couldn’t pay their bills. It was my first protest. Days later, Professor Marvin Tate told me: “I saw you and Bobo on TV protesting with the other communists!”
SBTS faculty, guests and students taught me about dissent.
Right now, just think about all the diversity, equity and inclusion in even a random reading of the words of Jesus, words we apply to the present time:
- “But while he was still a long way off his father saw him, and his heart went out to him; he ran to meet him, flung his arms round him, and kissed him.” (Luke 15:20)
- “At that moment his disciples returned and were astonished to find him talking with a woman.” (John 4:27)
- “But when you give a party, ask the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. That is the way to find happiness, because they have no means of repaying you.” (Luke 14:14)
- “If one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, do you not leave the 99 in the wilderness and go after the one that is missing until you find it? And when you do, you lift it joyfully on your shoulders and go home to call your friends and neighbors together. “Rejoice with me!” you cry. “For my sheep that was lost is now found.” (Luke 15:4-7)
- “This fellow,” some of them said, “welcomes sinners and eats with them.” (Luke 15:2)
- “If I your Lord and Master have washed your feet, you ought also to wash one another’s feet.” John 13:14)
Those words reflect what I’ve called Christ’s other passion without which his story is exceedingly incomplete. It is a passion for all the sinners lost and found that hurt and bleed and party in our world.
That is the passion that must claim us if we are to hear the high-pitched cries for help and the low decibels too deep for “normal” ears — passion that will not let us go until at least some of the hungry have been fed and some of the naked clothed, some of the disabled enabled and some of the prisoners set free. It’s a passion we need for interpreting the present time, a passion we learned from the likes of Glenn Hinson, Henlee Barnette, Ann Davis, Diana Garland, Glen Stassen, Bill Rogers, Paul Richardson, Molly Marshall and many of you in this very room.
“SBTS taught me that God’s grace is double-edged.”
SBTS taught me that God’s grace is double-edged. When Linda McKinnish Bridges got ordained to the gospel ministry, her father, Appalachian Mountain preacher Brother Harold McKinnish, decided she was “God called” after years of telling her it wasn’t so. At her Ph.D. graduation from Southern, he wept uncontrollably.
Invited to teach Greek at the seminary amid the infamous Southern Baptist “controversy,” McKinnish Bridges eventually was told her contract probably would not be renewed due to conservative opposition to an ordained woman teaching the Bible to men.
When her term ended, Brother Harold drove his truck from North Carolina to Louisville to help her empty her seminary office, but before he would let them leave the seminary campus, he compelled her to kneel with him in front of the school’s administration building, take off their shoes, and shake the dust of the place off their feet.
By chance or grace, I happened upon them at that moment and thought: “My Lord, Brother Harold’s put a curse on Southern Seminary!”
He didn’t. Linda calls it a “sacrament of failure” that took her beyond anger and bitterness. Her father proclaimed an audacious mountain gospel, and taking him at his word, daughter made that gospel more audacious than he ever imagined.
God’s grace is double edged, isn’t it? Sometimes grace overwhelms, and we shout our unrestrained hosannas as if faith would hold forever. Then life or circumstances take a turn outside or inside us; grace gets costly; faith demands courage; love demands compassion; and hope demands justice.
Let’s come to Christ’s Table and remember that today. Double-edged grace we learned from Southern’s saints and sinners for interpreting the gospel and ourselves in the present times.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
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